Though the university as a teaching body pined before the rising colleges, and for centuries lay in a swoon, it was not dead. It was kept alive by certain endowments for lecturers. But so thoroughly did the college tutors supply all undergraduate needs that, unless walls indeed have ears, the lectures were never heard. The professors gradually abandoned the university schools and gave the unattended lectures in their own houses. Such lectures were known as "study lectures." Even these gave way to silence. An odd situation was caused by the fact that there were also salaries paid to university proctors, a part of whose duty it was to see that the professorial lectures were properly given. When a proctor appeared, the learned professor would snatch up his manuscript and read until his auditor got tired and left. This was one case in which a thief was not the person to catch a thief; such energy on the part of the proctor was unusual, and was regarded as in extremely bad form. The abuse proceeded so far that in some cases, when hearers appeared at the appointed hour, the professors refused point blank to read their lectures. The climax of the farce was that at graduation students were fined for having cut these lectures that had never been given. When Samuel Johnson was fined for neglecting a college lecture to go "sliding on Christ Church Meadow," he exclaimed, "Sir, you have fined me twopence for missing a lecture that was not worth a penny!" His untimely departure from Oxford has lamentably left us to conjecture what he would have said upon paying the university fines at graduation for cutting lectures that had never been given.
Even the university examinations became farcical. Under the Laudian statutes the very examiners became corrupt. Instead of a feast of reason and a flow of soul, the wary student provided his examiner with good meat and wine; and the two, with what company they bade in, got gloriously drunk together. B. A. meant Bacchanal of Arts. Even when the forms of examination were held to, the farce was only less obvious. A writer in Terræ Filius, March 24, 1721, tells us that the examination consisted in "a formal repetition of a set of syllogisms upon some ridiculous question in logick, which the candidates get by rote, or perhaps read out of their caps, which lie before them." These commodious sets of syllogisms were called strings, and descended from undergraduate to undergraduate in a regular succession like themes and mechanical drawings in an American club or fraternity. "I have in my custody a book of strings upon most or all of the questions discussed in a certain college noted for its ratiocinative faculty; on the first leaf of which are these words: Ex dono Richardi P—— e primæ classi benefactoris munificentissimi." Lord Eldon took his degree at University College by an examination that consisted of two questions: "What is the meaning of Golgotha?" and "Who founded University College?" It was, no doubt, the bearers of degrees thus achieved who owned those marvelous libraries of the eighteenth century, which consisted of pasteboard boxes exquisitely backed in tooled calf, and labeled with the names of the standard Greek and Latin classics.
The decline of the university teaching and examination did not result in a corresponding rise in the colleges. Each of the dozen and more institutions was supposed, as I have said, to keep a separate faculty in arts, and often in law and theology as well. If there had been any incentive to ambition, the colleges might have vied with one another in their impossible task, or at least have gone far enough to bring about a reform. But they were rich and did not care. The wealth of collegiate endowments, that had begun by ruining the university, ended by ruining the colleges. There were still earnest teachers and students at Oxford, but they were not the rule. The chief energies of the tutors were spent in increasing their salaries by a careful management of the estates, and in evading their pupils. In "the splendid foppery of a well-turned period" Gibbon thus pictures the dons of Magdalen in 1752: "Their deep and dull potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth." Only one result was possible. In 1821 T. J. Hogg, Shelley's college-mate at University College, referred to Oxford as a seat of learning. "Why do you call it so?" Shelley cried indignantly. "Because," Hogg replied, "it is a place in which learning sits very comfortably, well thrown back as in an easy chair, and sleeps so soundly that neither you nor I nor anybody else can wake her." Permanent endowments had transferred the seat of learning from a nobly indigent university to the colleges, and the deep and dull potations of endowed tutors had put it asleep on the common-room chairs.
The nineteenth century did not altogether arouse it. "The studies of the university," according to the testimony of the Oxford Commission of 1850, "were first raised from their abject state by a statute passed in 1800." Heretofore all students had pursued the same studies, and there was no distinction to be gained at graduation except the mere fact of becoming a Bachelor of Arts. The statute of 1800 provided that such students as chose might distinguish themselves from the rest by taking honors; and for both passman and honor man it provided a dignified and quite undebauchable university examining board. At first the subjects studied were, roughly speaking, the same for passman and honor man; the difference was made by raising the standard of the honor examination. The examination followed the mediæval custom in being mainly oral; and though it soon came to be written, it still preserves the tradition of the mediæval disputation by including a viva voce which is open to the attendance of the public. Throughout the nineteenth century the development consisted mainly in adding a few minor schools.
The good and bad features of the English college system as a whole should not be hard to distinguish. In all social aspects the colleges are as nearly perfect as human institutions are capable of becoming, and they are the foundation of an unequaled athletic life. Educationally, their qualities are mixed. For the purpose of common or garden English gentlemen, nothing could be better than a happy combination of tutorial instruction and university examining. For the purposes of scholarly instruction in general, and of instruction in the modern sciences and mechanic arts in particular, few things could be worse than the system as at present construed.
To exult over the superiority of American institutions in so many of the things that make up a modern university would not be a very profitable proceeding. Let us neglect the imperfections of Oxford. It is of much greater profit to consider the extraordinary social advantages that arise from the division of the university into colleges, and the educational advantages of the honor schools. These are points with regard to which we are as poor as Oxford is poor in the scope of university instruction.
The point will perhaps be clearer for a brief review of the manner in which our college system grew out of the English. The development is the reverse of what we have just been considering. In England, the colleges overshadowed the university and sapped its life. With us, the university has overshadowed the college and is bidding fair to annihilate it.
VII
In 1636 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed an act to establish a "schoole or colledge," and set apart a tract of land in "New Towne" as its seat, which they called Cambridge. Our Puritan forefathers had carried from the English university the conviction that "sound learning" is the "root of true religion," and were resolved, in their own vigorous phrase, that it should not be "buried in the graves of the fathers." In 1638 a master of arts of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, John Harvard, bequeathed to the new institution his library and half his fortune, some £780. A timber building was erected and a corporation formed which bore the donor's name. From the regulations in force in 1655 it is evident that in its manner of life, its laws of government, the studies taught, and the manner of granting the degree, Harvard College was a close counterpart of the English college of the early seventeenth century, its very phraseology including such terms as "disputing," "proceeding," "determining." It was the first institution of higher education in British America. Until the founding of the first state university, the University of Virginia, in 1819, the constitution afforded the principal model for subsequent foundations, and to-day colleges of the Harvard type are perhaps the strongest factor in American education. Harvard thus transplanted to American soil the full measure of the traditions of the Middle Ages, many of which exist in a modified form to-day.